Last year, Washington schools levied more than 68,000 suspensions and expulsions, according to the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). Rates peaked at the end of middle school, with nearly one out of every 10 eighth graders suspended or expelled. One out of every 65 all-day kindergarteners was also excluded from school for behavior.

Myth 2: Most students are suspended or expelled because they’re dangerous.

Aside from fights — which made up 15 percent of suspensions and expulsions — only 7 percent of all reported suspensions and expulsions in Washington in 2013 and 2014 were for violence, according to OSPI data. More than half of all suspensions and expulsions fall in the discretionary “other behavior” category, which does not include alcohol, bullying, drugs, fighting or violence.

Visiting educators and community members are a common sight at Big Picture School in the Highline School District, where I serve as principal. These visitors are interested in thinking differently about public schools, and they often ask about our use of a discipline approach called restorative justice — how it works, if it is worth the resources, and if it appears scalable to larger schools or districts.

My short answer to all of the above: Absolutely.

About five years ago, an 11th-grade student named Laura Jimenez Guerra introduced me to restorative justice and proposed giving suspended students the option of reducing their time out of school by meeting with a panel of community members to address the harm caused by their actions. At multiple times during the process, we remind students the entire ordeal is optional and depends upon their willingness to participate actively and own their actions.

The ensuing conference brings the student together with one or two of the identified allies and community members representing different types of harm resulting from the student’s choices. With the support of these individuals, the student goes through three steps:

identifying his or her thinking leading up to, through, and after the event(s)

understanding and validating the harm or potential harm caused by the student’s choices

Addiction to drugs or alcohol is a chronic, progressive, family disease — meaning it’s incurable but treatable. The longer it’s left untreated, the worse it becomes for not only the addict and his or her loved ones, but for the entire community as well.

The earlier someone uses drugs or alcohol, the more likely he or she is to become an addict. Young people are also more vulnerable because parts of their brains are still developing. There is a dangerously fine line between experimentation, where someone can stop using, and addiction, where he or she no longer has that choice.

Here’s the good news: With treatment including a continuing care component, chances for maintaining sobriety improve and people are more likely to avoid devastating lifelong effects that come with addiction.

What can we as a community do to help young people facing addiction? Here are two, relatively simple ways we can help them begin the road to recovery. Our schools play a crucial role in both approaches.

Two of the best humanities teachers I know left my district 18 months ago to teach abroad in Dubai, and now they are preparing to renew their contracts for two more years. After 10 years of teaching math, one of the best math teachers I know is seeking a teacher leadership post in another state.

Another one of my colleagues, a science teacher, recently told me about feeling exhausted and the need to leave the classroom in favor of a job in industry.

We have a looming teacher-retention crisis in Washington state and the most likely teachers to leave the career are often among our best, most impactful.

No one feels these losses more acutely than families living in poverty, for whom education is a way to the middle class. A great teacher is a powerful leader on that path.

Despite the talent drain, the public school system remains ill-prepared to attract and retain the excellent teachers that our students need, especially in high-poverty schools where turnover is even higher.

Great teachers have the ability to generate an additional five to six months of student learning in a year. A critical mass of great teachers in a building can be enough persuasion for other strong teachers to stay in the profession.

Earlier this year, the Seattle School Board changed the kind of math textbooks used in our elementary schools, selecting texts intended to be used with explicit instruction. Under explicit instruction, teachers are expected to actually teach rather than turn students loose to discover mathematics principles on their own. The board picked the Math in Focus series, a version of Singapore Math.

Seattle Public Schools began using reform math textbooks in the 1990s. In that approach, students are supposed to learn by discovering mathematical truth in the process of solving problems. They typically work in groups, noting their thoughts in journals and portfolios, and using calculators constantly as they complete discovery-type projects. Advocates have touted reform math as a way to get kids excited about math and create a culture of learning.

Unfortunately, this approach was based on an unrealistic vision rather than on fact. It has been a failure both in Seattle and in the U.S. as a whole; our math students have fared poorly in comparison with those of other developed countries. On the most recent international math test, the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the U.S. finished 36th of the 65 countries participating, behind virtually all other developed countries. Earlier tests showed similar results.

During the last seven years, my students at Ballard High School consistently performed better than their peers at other public Seattle high schools on Advanced Placement Calculus exams. Since 2011, when state end-of-course tests were established, I have taught only one class that has a state test and is required for graduation — Algebra 1, our school’s lowest-level math class, in the 2011-12 school year. My students earned the highest passage rate in the district on that test.

Special education in Washington is a mess. For families, it can be adversarial and emotionally draining. For students, it can be isolating, even traumatizing. We need to create equal opportunities to learn.

For those in the field, that can be hard to hear, and certainly we have some phenomenal staff members working with children with disabilities. Still, conflicts with special education are the most common calls to the state’s Office of the Education Ombuds, by far. And many problems with discipline and bullying loop back to it.

Parents struggle with delays or denial of interventions and accommodations. Children struggle with segregation and a sense of failure that erode their emotional health.

All this was captured in a recent report to the Legislature calling for a commission to usher in change. But what got lost in translation was the proposed solution.

Diversity in our technology and engineering workforce is a hot topic, and with good reason. Washington has the highest concentration of science, tech, engineering and math (STEM)-related jobs in the country, but the lack of women and people of color in this sector is glaringly obvious.

It isn’t enough to simply complain. We must tackle the root causes of this issue, not only for the good of individuals who will find livelihoods in this sector, but for our innovation-based industries as well.

Pursuing a career in STEM is a smart move for many students. These professions offer above-average pay and a range of fulfilling job opportunities. So why isn’t there more diversity? According to a study by the U.S. Census Department last year, African Americans hold only 6 percent of the jobs in these fields, and Hispanics only 7 percent — numbers far below their representation in the overall workforce. Women hold only 26 percent of these jobs.

In order to grow our technical workforce, the talent pool from which STEM companies find their employees must grow much more diverse. As someone who works with leaders in the tech industry, I can report that CEOs believe that diversifying their workforces is not only the right thing to do, it is also seen as a business imperative.

The most volatile period of my 35-year career in education is happening now. Across the country, teachers have begun to react to downgrades in their status, credibility and authority.

According to a 2014 report from the Alliance for Excellent Education, the annual attrition rate of first-year teachers has risen by 40 percent over the last two decades, and 40 to 50 percent now leave the teaching profession within five years. Every year, 13 percent of teachers abandon the profession or migrate to more appealing schools, often leaving the disadvantaged more so.

The Washington state Legislature, charged with scrounging billions of dollars in additional funding to improve education and comply with the McCleary decision, must take the lead in funding effective training programs for our state’s teachers and give them the opportunity to collaborate and support each other.

In Washington and elsewhere, the insidious loss of professional power among American educators is eroding our quality of education. Many schools find it difficult to hire teachers in some subjects, such as mathematics, but only half the math and science teachers in disadvantaged schools have a degree and a license in their fields. Locally, we have seen teaching veterans bail, as outside meddling displaces learning. Not surprisingly, “highly qualified” means less when comparing our teachers across cultures or across nations.

Here’s one thing you can do to jumpstart your child’s literacy skills, whether or not Seattle voters approve one of the two early learning measures on the November ballot.

One of the most important ways you can interact with your infant is simple: Talk. A lot. If you do, you greatly increase your baby’s future language skills. That includes vocabulary, rate of vocabulary growth, listening, speaking, semantics, syntax and, later, reading comprehension. The amount of talk that gets these results, according to a landmark study? Two-thousand, one hundred words per hour.

That number freaked me out. So I dug into the research as I wrote my new book, “Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science.” Here’s the story:

Betty Hart tried everything she could think of to improve the vocabularies of the 4-year-olds in the low-income preschool where she was teaching. She couldn’t do it. Finally, she and Todd Risley, her graduate supervisor at the University of Kansas, figured out that, by age 4, it was too late.

Parent engagement is key to helping students make good decisions about their future and successfully achieve their dreams, particularly during students’ high school experiences.

But for me, parent engagement isn’t just about what I can do for my daughter. It’s also about what I can do to benefit all children.

My daughter Paulina and I moved to Washington from Mexico a few years ago. The language barrier made it difficult for me to understand how the school system worked or what classes my daughter was enrolled in.

Parents need to be engaged, but they also need accessible information about their child’s education. From personal experience, I can tell you that remaining engaged in your child’s education isn’t possible when you’re struggling to understand complex, bureaucratic information in a foreign language.

As a result, while in high school, Paulina took Algebra 1 four times, despite earning good grades and passing the class each time she was enrolled. This fall, Paulina must enroll in remedial math classes at a community college to learn the math she didn’t learn in high school before she can apply to a four-year institution.

Stories in the series

When tackling the topic of student discipline, some of the country’s toughest schools have done a turnaround. Instead of focusing on rules broken, they now ask kids to confront themselves. The result? Fewer suspensions and new perspective on the point of school itself. Read the story →

It stands to reason: Kick troubled students out of school and they often come back even worse. The Kent School District is trying to tackle this national problem by overhauling the way it handles discipline. But its answers spark even more questions. Read the story →

In an idea borrowed from college athletics, the University of Washington boosts promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — with an extra year of academic work. Read the story →

Boosting the quality of preschool in Seattle could help children, and the city as a whole. A number of studies, including one from the ’60s, establish that potential. But there is no guarantee of success. Read the story →

Universal, free preschool in Tulsa, Okla., has produced results attracting national attention, and could be a blueprint for Seattle. But after 16 years the long-term outcomes raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read the story →

Communication failures both within Seattle Public Schools and with parents of children with disabilities continue to undermine the district’s efforts to fix longstanding problems in special education. Read the story →

A new focus on individualized advice and counseling, boosted by software tools, is helping hundreds more students earn degrees and certificates each year at Walla Walla Community College. Read the story →

The path to college often leaves disadvantaged students behind. Two unusual nonprofits, one based in Seattle, have helped vault thousands of low-income students onto university campuses. Read the story →

In an attempt to add depth to the curriculum in America's most popular advanced high-school courses, some local teachers threw out most of their lectures and replaced them with a series of projects. Results so far are encouraging. Read the story →

Western Washington University college students are working as mentors, tutors and role models for thousands of K-12 students in and around Bellingham. The goal: convince them that college should be part of their educational trajectory. Read the story →

Kent educators combed through transcripts and discovered 2,600 young people in their district without any kind of diploma or credential. Enter iGrad, a program linking dropouts with college, that has been flooded with kids who want a second chance. Read the story →

A community group in northwest Chicago has turned hundreds of hesitant parents into capable classroom helpers, role models and leaders by tapping into strengths many don't realize they have. Read the story →

Missing just a few days of class in sixth grade can predict whether you'll graduate from high school. That research powers a national anti-dropout effort that's making a difference at Seattle's Aki Kurose and Denny International middle schools. Read the story →

For years, students at White Center Heights Elementary logged some of the lowest test scores in King County. Then teachers tried something new, and the numbers soared by double-digits after just one year. So what happened, and could it be replicated elsewhere? Read the story →

About the authors

John Higgins is one of Education Lab's reporters. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2012 to 2013.

Katherine Long has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 1990, focusing for the past three years on higher ed, with stories that have ranged from the complexities of prepaid tuition programs to nontraditional ways to earn a degree.

Claudia Rowe joined The Seattle Times’ reporting staff in 2013. She has written about education for The New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other publications.

Leah Todd is an education reporter at The Times. She previously covered education for the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

Mike Siegel has been a news photographer at the Seattle Times since 1987. His photography was used in a series titled "Methadone and the Politics of Pain," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for investigative reporting.

Linda Shaw is The Times’ education editor. Previously, she covered public education as a reporter at The Seattle Times for more than two decades. Her coverage has won numerous national and local awards and honors.

Caitlin Moran is community engagement editor for Education Lab. She came to The Times from Patch, where she spent three years managing hyperlocal news websites on the Eastside.

About Solutions Journalism Network

The Education Lab project is being done with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network. SJN is a non-profit organization created to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.